The team that practised losing

A basketball coach spent twenty minutes a week rehearsing situations in which the team was behind with two minutes left. They lost no fewer games. They lost fewer of those games.

The distinction is the point. Most training time is spent on the modal situation: the state of play that occupies most minutes. The decisive situations are rare by definition, and because they are rare they get rehearsed least, although their effect on the result is disproportionate. A team that is behind late has a narrow set of correct behaviours — foul deliberately, take the earliest available good shot rather than the best one, know the possession count — and each of them runs against instinct, which is to play better rather than faster.

This is a general feature of performance under pressure. The instinctive response to urgency is to increase effort, and in a situation defined by a shortage of time the useful response is to change the decision rule. Effort is not what is scarce.

Rehearsing rare situations has a second effect that coaches report more often than the first. The players stop treating the last two minutes as a different kind of event. A situation that has been practised twenty times is a situation rather than a crisis, and the physiological difference is measurable: in rehearsed scenarios the same players make fewer unforced errors and call for the ball more.

The method transfers awkwardly but it does transfer. An examination has a version of the last two minutes, and so does a presentation and a job interview. The question is not whether you perform well in general but whether you have ever practised the ninety seconds that decide it.